Everyone in the northern Virginia area is familiar with the Virginia Railway Express (VRE). For those of you in other areas of Virginia, the VRE is the commuter train that originates in either Fredericksburg or Manassas and heads into Union Station making stops along the way. If you frequent northern Virginia blogs you’ve probably heard the litany of VRE issues mainly along the Fredericksburg line. Those issues are mainly “on-time” performance and fare increases. Basically the VRE has a horrid on-time performance record and seems to raise fares at least twice a year. I make no secret of my distaste for the VRE. I got tired of constantly being late to work and then having to constantly pay more money in order to be late to work. So I switched to slugging. Everybody knows that old chestnut. Like any bureaucracy, VRE is very good about whining and complaining about how they don’t have enough money to do this and do that and so they have no choice but to sock it to their poor riders. So here’s my advice to VRE. Sit down and concoct what your dream budget would be. Now, don’t be silly about this. Don’t make it something like $225 trillion. Seriously, calculate what your budget would be to make everything run on time, pay employees, etc. After you’ve done that……wait for it…….increase your ticket fare such that you can generate that level of smackeroos. Oh sure…….there’ll be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth; no doubt about it. No doubt there will be a decline in ridership. Disgusted folks will turn to the commuter buses, car-pooling and swallow their fear of slugging (trust me, it only feels kinky the first time) in lieu of VRE. However, there is a core group of VRE riders whose demand for VRE is inelastic. That means they will ride VRE no matter what reasonable increases in fare (obviously they won’t pay $300,000/ride). In other words, the people who really like VRE and absolutely will not try substitutes are finally paying for the service. The rest of us can keep our hard-earned money. I know you’re dying to say it. But, Jay, VRE will become so expensive that nobody will use it!!!! No, that’s not true. There will be people who will use it. Just not as many as before. And when VRE management sees all those empty trains? Well, they’ll stop funding those empty trains and reprogram that money to their employees’ salaries and benefits. Well, I hope they will. So this turns out to be a win-win-win situation for everybody. The heathen (those willing to try new, innovative transportation modes…there’s that capitalistic notion of innovation again) will move on to other things, the devout (those inelastic demanders of VRE) will pay for the service they love and those underpaid/overworked VRE employees will finally get the compensation they deserve. Oh no, no, no….please save your applause. In fact, don’t even name this wonderful idea after me….I am but a mere mortal…….why not name it after my cat? Yes….we can call it the Dr. Isis initiative….now that sounds much better doesn’t it?
Filed under: Transportation
I oppose all subsidies for VRE, and Omnilink or whatever the Prince William county bus service is called. If commuters want to work in DC and take public transporation they should pay what ever the actual cost is…this would be a good place for the BOCS to save the $18 million shortfall. Have the users pay the cost.
Brilliant idea!
Lets do the same with highways. Figure out how much it cost to build and maintain and start charging tolls. On all roads. Don’t foget that the tolls should include the real cost of increased water pollution from run-off, air polution from exhaust, and fatalities from idiot drivers. I guess it would be hard to put a price on the viewshed degradation, since some people might think that 4 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic stopped might be a beautiful thing.
Andrew, they already do that in the form of the highway user fee (a.k.a. the gas tax). That is in lieu of tolls. We just need the state to firewall the transportation trust fund the way the feds already do.
1. I agree with you, the transportation trust fund should be firewalled.
2. The “user fees” you mention only partly pay for the the cost of our current infrastructure. A significant number of secondary costs are not paid for out of the transportation trust fund.
3. We in the valley face a different transportation issue; crowding on I-81 due to truck traffic.
4. In the I-81 case, the tax payers end up subsidizing the trucking industry.